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Gothic Novel
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Gothic Novel or Gothic Romance is a story of terror and suspense, usu. set in a gloomy old castle or monastery. Following the appearance of Horace Walpole¡¯s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the gothic novel flourished in Britain from the 1790s to the 1820s, dominated by Ann Radcliffe, whose Mystery of Udolpho (1794) had many imitators. In an extended sense, many novels that do not have a medievalized setting, but which share a comparably sinister, grotesque, or claustrophobic atmosphere have been classed as gothic: Mary Shelley¡¯s Frankenstein (1818) is a fine example. Poe, Faulkner and many others wrote gothic stories and novels.
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The development of the Gothic Novel from the melancholy overtures of sentimental literature to the rise of the sublime in the graveyard poets had a profound impact on the budding Romantic movement from Wordsworth to Shelley. The astounding features and use of the sublime and the overt use of the supernatural, profoundly influenced the style and material of the emerging romantics. Gothic Novels such as The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett, Longsword, Earl of Salisbury by Thomas Leland, The Old English Baron: A Gothic Story by Clara Reeve and Vathek: An Arabian Tale by William Beckford led Coleridge to write a Gothic drama, Shelley to write two Gothic Novels and Byron to write Manfred.
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James Henderson’s article ‘The Gothic Novel in Wales (1790–1820)’ provides a useful starting point for a study of Wales-related fiction of the romantic period. [1]Examining the extent to which Wales was used as a setting for the gothic novel between 1790 and 1820 he concludes that ‘as a literary type the Gothic novel set in Wales never made an appearance, although the development of such a species could reasonably have been expected’. [2]Indeed, a cursory browse through any gothic bibliography will demonstrate that Wales did not fare as well as Scotland and Ireland in this respect, despite possessing the requisite sublime landscapes and vestiges of former grandeur. Nevertheless, the fact that Wales for the most part failed to capture the imagination of gothic novelists should not diminish the significance of a sizeable body of fiction, which is, to varying degrees, concerned with or set in Wales. In his accompanying checklist Henderson identifies forty-eight works of fiction that ‘immediately indicate’ Welsh interest. [3]However, this figure of forty-eight does require revision.
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The fact that "Terrorist Novel Writing," "The Terrorist System of Novel Writing" and other satirical articles ... became imitative in themselves, all using supposedly satirical recipes to denigrate the Gothic genre further, emphasised the universal nature of this process of consumption. The "hothouse productivity of the 1790s" that E.J. Clery discusses in relation to the Gothic extends beyond the realm of the novel to all literary endeavour, and inevitably, criticism itself was not untainted by uncritical consumption. Just as the Gothic came to be identified as a recognizable "technology" through its critical reception in the 1790s, so too did its critical recipes. By using the same generic convention—the recipe—to mock formulaic fiction that seemingly "blunted" the mind, reviewers also created a new generic technology that was as manufactured as its target.
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Perhaps the most gothic scene in the novel is in Dr. Seward's diary when they discover the beautiful Lucy in the field with a child. Dr. Seward and Arthur are tempted to run towards her when they hear a child like cry, but Van Helsing warns them off. They soon find out, "by the concentrated light that fell on Lucy's face we could see that the lips were crimson with fresh blood, and that the stream had trickled over her chin and satined the purity of her lawn death robe" (226). Lucy snarls like "an angry cat" and her eyes look like "hellfire." "With a careless motion, she flung to the ground, callous as a devil, the child that to now she had clenched strenuously to her breast, growling over it as a dog growls over a bone" (227. Lucy puts Arthur in a trance and tells him "her arms are hungry for him."
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[One] writer in this gothic tradition was Henry Farrell whose best-known work was the Hollywood horror novel What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1960). Farrel's novels spawned a sub-genre of 'Grande Dame Guignol' in the cinema, dubbed the "Psycho-biddy" genre. Notable contemporary British writers in the Gothic tradition are Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black (1983), and Patrick McGrath, author of The Grotesque (1989).
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